We covered antiques and rarities in Part 1 of this year's Colorado Conclave survey, and the idea for Part 2 was to cover production cars. But "production" can be a slippery term when you're talking about England's specialist car makers. For example, Aston Martin's DB 2/4 was that firm's most popular version of the DB 2...maybe because the "/4" indicated extra seating in the fastback coupe, which Aston optimistically called a saloon. 764 copies of the DB 2/4 found buyers, and 565 were the Mark I version shown. But of those, only 73 were drophead coupés like this one; the rest were the then-novel hatchback. So during Mark I production from 1953 through '55; Aston Martin Lagonda built about 2 dozen of these convertibles every year…
They were nicely turned out, with alloy-paneled coachwork by Tickford, and the 125 hp from the 2.6 liter DOHC Lagonda inline six (140 hp in the 2.9 liter Mk. II) gave the 2,700 pound car lively (but not Jaguar level) performance. Then again, the point of the Aston was its handbuilt exclusivity, and the drophead delivered that...
You probably wouldn't expect to encounter a Citroen from a French crime thriller at an English car show, unless you knew that Citroen operated an assembly plant at Slough, 20 miles west of London, starting in 1926. This catered to a stong British market for CItroen's early rear-drive cars (over 20,000 sold in Britain by 1923) and naturally continued when Andre Citroen launched the pioneering front-drive Traction Avant series in 1934. This one, a "barn-find" Traction Avant* Light 15 model from 1954, features a 1.9 liter inline 4. The Big 15 model featured a 2.9 liter six.
Products of Citroen's Slough Works included a Deux Chevaux truck supplied to the Royal Navy, and ID 19s sent to Connaught Cars*, which having sold off its GP racers, was modifying these IDs with bucket seats and DS instrument panels as the British market-only D-GT, and doing a brisk business. Citroen's Slough branch became a sales and service operation after 1965...
The Slough-built Citroens, like the "slow-built" early Jaguars, featured wood interior trim and leather seating (unlike their French sisters) along with the requisite righthand drive. The Jaguar Mark V below, from 1951, was built just as Jaguar was phasing out the Standard-based six cylinder pushrod engines with Jaguar-designed OHV heads, to the new twin-cam XK series. These were among the first Jaguars that Max Hoffman imported into the car-hungry postwar US. Like the Citroen, they are good examples of Thirties body design that survived into the Fifties. The Citroen's unit construction and front-drive, however, were more predictive of future design trends...
A trio of Jaguar XK 120s lines up for spectators. The Conclave invites all visitors to vote on their favorite cars in each category, and as Britain had dozens of manufacturers during the decades covered, there can be a lot of categories. And with nearly 500 vehicles (including motorcycles) expected, there were plenty of choices. The red XK120* below is a roadster (or open top sports) with side curtains instead of the roll-down windows on the blue drophead coupé. The XK120 dropheads and fixed-head coupés added wood dash panels and door caps. Wire wheels were an option throughout the production which began in 1949 with the roadster; the fixed-roof arrived for 1951, and the drophead for 1953. Ordering the knock-off wire wheels meant deleting the rear wheel spats shown on the roadster.
The XK series of Jaguars had performance to match their sensational looks, and that sold them to Americans. In its first version, the 3.4 liter (210 cubic inch) inline six made 160 hp, as much as the then-new Cadillac V8. Later SE versions offered 180 hp, and by 1953 the C-Type head offered by US Jaguar dealers meant 210 hp, which was near what the Chrysler Hemi offered. All XKs featured aluminum heads with inclined valves operated by chain-driven dual overhead cams. The XK 120 gave way to the more practical XK 140 during 1954, and by 1957 the 140 would be the first production car with 4-wheel disc brakes.
Ironically, Jaguar chief William Lyons had originally planned to offer this engine first in a luxury sedan called the Mk VII, and had stylist Malcolm Sayer dream up a two-seat roadster as a sort of rolling display stand for that engine while engineers readied the big sedan. When it showed up at the Earls Court auto show in autumn of 1948, though, it attracted so many deposits that Jaguar found itself in the sports car business. When the big sedan appeared, it featured a mix of traditional and modern features, with smooth curves enclosing a leather-lined interior complete with wood dash and seatback picnic tables, all fronted by a traditional radiator.
This one is a Mk IX; both the Mk VIII and Mk IX differ from the Mk VII in having the swoop of chrome trim running from the upper front to the lower rear fenders. This was used as a color separation line on two-tone cars. Jaguar was unable to resist two-toning in the 1950s, but unlike Mercedes they never caved in to tail fins...
A British racing green 3.8 Mk II lounges in the sun; it shares the leather interior, wood trim and picnic tables with the bigger Mark IX and contemporary Mark X. You're probably wondering how a Mark II followed a Mark V by a decade; you'd need to know that the 3.8 liter sedan appearing in 1959 was Version 2.0 (bigger windows, bigger engine) of the 3.4 and 2.4 liter sedans that Jaguar introduced in 1956…these, however, were known only in retrospect as Mark I. Jaguar nomenclature has never been a study in linear logic. No matter, the compact, powerful, disc-braked sedans were a hit with police (and gangsters) and with Britain's equivalent of stock car racers...
Likewise, while Jaguar made C, D, and also E-Types like these specimens lined up on the lawn below, there were never any A or B-Types. Illogical, no? Well, when Jaguar introduced their two-time Le Mans-winning road racer in 1951, it was originally called the XK120C (competition) in order to convince race organizers that this was just a version of their production car. Eventually, Jaguar would build 50 or so or what they finally called the C-Type. It was followed in '54 by the D-Type (a 3-time Le Mans winner) logically enough, and when in 1961 the company decided to capitalize on the resemblance of their new production sports car to the D-Type racers, they called it the E-Type. This photo shows all three flavors of Series 1 E-Type*, with OTS (open two seater, often called roadster) in red on the left, 2+2 coupe in center with 2 added seats, 6" more wheelbase and taller roof, introduced for the '66 model year, and the original 2-passenger fixed-head coupe on the right. The 2+2 chassis would eventually form the basis of the Series 3 V12 in 1971; all Series 3 cars had the 102" wheelbase, not for a longer engine (it wasn't) but for more cabin space.
The E-Type, with its 4-wheel independent suspension joining all-disc brakes and stressed-skin body construction, looked like a revolution as the Sixties were just beginning, but at the end of the Fifties, British Motor Company's senior engineer Alec Issigonis (later Sir Alexander) launched what would be a more far-reaching revolution with his Minis, transverse-engined front-drive urban runabouts with surprising room for four within an 80" wheelbase and 120" overall length. The 850cc cars were sold by Austin as the Austin 7 and Morris Mini Minor. Mini* became a separate make in 1969, and BMW retained the Mini brand after purchasing Rover Group in 1994. The transverse engine, front-drive scheme became a space-saving template for later cars like the Fiat 128 and VW Golf. BMW launched a larger, modern Mini in 2001. It retained the front-drive tranverse engine layout, but engines and transmissions were no longer forced to share the same oil...
The original Mini Countryman wagon had authentic wood on the exterior, along with 4.2" more wheelbase and 9" more overall length. In addition to the Countryman, de luxe "badge-engineered" versions were built with extended trunks (think of the later VW Jetta vs. Golf) and traditional RIley or Wolseley radiator grilles. But the Mini that really became a fashion statement in Swinging Sixties London was the Mini Cooper S, a performance version originally launched by John Cooper's race car outfit (whose mid-engined racers won Formula 1 driver and manufacturer titles in '59 and '60) and adopted by BMC in much the way they'd adopted Donald Healey's Hundred to become the Austin Healey 100-4. Especially after Paddy Hopkirk won the '64 Monte Carlo Rally (Minis would go on to win 4 rally titles), the Mini was the car for rock stars, pop singers and aspiring actors to drive around London. BMC launched the Mini Moke, an elemental front-drive utility vehicle, in the same year, and would continue production into 1993...
The Italians got into the Mini act as well, with Innocenti* building a version which became popular on Europe's crowded city streets. It offered the same drivetrain as the BMC versions (this one's a Cooper-spec. 1000) and the added refinement of roll-down door windows with the triangular vent panes that also appeared on some Australian versions of the Mini. This one also has flared wheel arches over wider wheels.
A couple years before the first Mini, Colin Chapman attempted a revolution in roadgoing sports cars with the Lotus Elite. This green Elite participated in the Colorado Grand* rally, and headed up a line of Lotus cars spanning decades, each one an example of extracting lots of performance out of relatively small engines by minimizing weight and optimizing aerodynamics. All the cars in this row are bodied in fiberglass, and they were all fast enough to make car enthusiasts want them, despite the Lotus reputation for fragility and high maintenance demands...
The Elite (Type 14) at the right below appeared in 1957, and was Colin Chapman's first attempt at a series (if not mass) produced, dual-purpose sports car that could be raced on weekends and driven to the office on workdays. A 1.2 liter, single overhead cam Coventry Climax four featured aluminum block and heads, and was based on that firm's fire pump engine. To its left, a red Elan drophead with 1.6 liter Ford-based four and Cosworth-designed twin-cam head. Then, in white, a mid-engined Esprit Series 3 with Lotus-designed 16 valve twin-cam 2.2 liter four and Citroen 5-speed transmission, which outlived the Citroen Maserati in Lotus products (Citroen sneaks into our all-English show yet again). Barely visible beyond it, a 21st century, green Lotus Elise with mid-mounted Toyota power...
For that pioneering Elite, Peter Kirwan-Taylor designed an elegantly simple aerodynamic body that was, after the tiny Berkeley (see end of this essay) the first unitized fiberglass body-chassis to reach production. It featured a steel subframe for the front-mounted engine, with a reinforcing roll hoop around the winshield, to which the door hinges attached. Weight was only 1,455 pounds, and this meant that the most highly tuned Climax engines (95 or 105 hp) offered startling performance to go with razor-sharp handling. Even with the base 75 hp engine, England's Motor magazine reached just under 112 mph, and 0-60 in 11.4 seconds in 1960. This came at a price; that year the P.O.E. price in the USA was $4,108 for that base Elite, only $400 less than a Jaguar XK150 with nearly 3 times the power.
The flat tail with recessed panel was unique in 1957, and predictive of Sixties GT designs. Sound transmission into the cockpit was a problem, especially from the rear suspension towers. Because of the deep interior door recesses, the compound-curved side windows needed to be removed and stowed for real ventilation, an all-or-nothing proposition. Despite these impracticalities and its high price, the Elite managed to qualify as a production car in racing classes, and more importantly to put Lotus on the map as a car maker. Before giving way to the more practical, steel backbone chassis Elan after 1963, Lotus claimed that they'd built 988 Elites. It's not certain that all these body / chassis units turned into finished cars, however, as some Elites were sold in England as kits to help lower the price.
One surprise visitor to the show was this Berkeley, a minimalist 2-seater more in the spirit of the original Lotus 7 than the Elite, though it featured, like the Elite, a unitized fiberglass body-chassis (here reinforced with alloy) in 1956, a year before the first Elite, just in time to respond to the minicar boom prompted the Suez crisis and resulting fuel shortages. It was a product of designer Laurie Bond's proposal to Berkeley Coachworks' Charles Panter; Berkeley Ltd. had gained experience with fiberglass as England's leading builder of travel trailers but was looking for something that would offer steadier cash flow than the seasonal caravan business. The original front-drive Berkeley, offered in 4 or 3 wheel form (another tax-saving option, like those Elite kits) was powered by 2-stroke, 2 cylinder engines. This example, like the 1958 Road & Track test car, originally had a 328 cc Excelsior twin, making about 18 hp. Their test weight for the 70" wheelbase car was 850 lb., and it reached 50 mph in a leisurely 28 seconds, topping out at 58 mph (65 with the top up). There was also a 3-cylinder, 492 cc version, and in one, Lorenzo Bandini won the 750 class at the '58 Monza 12-hour race.
This example, however, has been retrofitted with a Honda motorcycle engine making around 3 times the horsepower of that old 2-stroke. Fast plastic indeed...
*Footnote: Previous posts in this blog referencing some of the subject cars follow. Dates are in parentheses:
Aston Martin DB2/4: "Rescued from Obscurity: Aston Martin in the 50s & 60s (5-11-20).
Citroen Traction + BMC Mini: "First Modern Car: Round Up the Usual Suspects (9-26-20).
Connaught:"Celtic Rainmaker: Connaught Broke the Longest Drought in GP Racing"(7-24-16).
Jaguar XK120: "Game Changer: Jaguar XK120" (7-16-17).
Jaguar E-Type: "Racing Improves the Breed" (8-13-17).
Innocenti sports and GT cars: "The Etceterini Files, Part 4: Innocenti 186 GT" (2-3-16).
This year's Colorado Grand Rally was pictured in "Summertime Dream" (9-26-21).
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